The present invention relates generally to the creation of an imaging data set and more particularly to the creation of an imaging data set that represents an isolated region or area of a subject.
Morphological image data, also known as anatomical or structural image data (as opposed to functional image data), often contains impressive detail. For example, morphological MR head image data often provides detailed information of the anatomical structure of the brain. In order to analyze or quantify portions or regions of the brain, segmentation of the morphological brain image data found in the head image data is often employed. However, head image data also often includes skull image data, and before such segmentation of the brain image data can occur, it is desirous to first isolate the brain image data from the skull image data. That is, in such an instance, it can be difficult to analyze or quantify brain tissue data before non-brain tissue data is segmented from brain tissue data. As such, a segmentation technique is often first employed to segment the brain tissue data from the non-brain tissue data such as skull data. Once segmented, the isolated brain tissue data allows for image-processing algorithms to more easily segment different tissues or regions within the brain and generate quantitative data from the morphological brain data. One example of quantitative brain data is the thickness of the cerebral cortex, which is of interest in studies related to dementia, migraines, and intelligence, among others.
The amount of detail in some morphological image data makes the data rich in information, but the detail can also make it difficult to segment out the regions of interest. For example, the level of detail represented in a morphological image data set can make it difficult to isolate brain detail from surrounding detail such as eyes, skull, and other surrounding tissues. These same details can also make it difficult to generate a 3D contour separating brain from non-brain tissue. Segmentation may be directly employed on such data sets, but this may be a computational and algorithmically difficult task. Similar difficulties arise when attempting to quantify other regions or areas, other than the brain, of a subject.
It would therefore be desirable to have a system and method capable of efficiently isolating regions of an imaging subject for later quantitation.